


If It Kills Me

by beekeepercain



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Episode: s08e19 Taxi Driver, Hope, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Purgatory, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-07
Updated: 2013-04-07
Packaged: 2017-12-07 18:31:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/751667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beekeepercain/pseuds/beekeepercain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When everyone else has a major part to play, Dean finds himself with the role of the bystander with nothing to keep his his hopes and fears at bay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If It Kills Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vhanstiel (Wongvhan)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wongvhan/gifts).



> Vhanstiel requested a fic based on Jason Mraz's[ If It Kills Me](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTWLwCvoA4s), and for some reason, I bit. I'm the suckiest request filler in existence and on top of that, when I try to base something on something, I just end up wanting to paste the thing I'm supposed to base on as the finished work and leave it at that. I never have anything to _add_ , so I end up flailing haplessly about trying to understand how I am supposed to convey the feelings and images to my potential audience. Surprisingly, I did manage to add something this time, or rather, sum up a history of something.
> 
> Ahem. The result isn't _nearly_ what I expected - this fic is more of an incoherent, clumsy amateur POV meta with a POV, but it ties up neatly enough with the song (and damn, it uses the song to stay together, which means it actually - literally - bases on it) and proved entertaining enough at parts to maybe be worthwhile.
> 
> I'm sorry I couldn't do better than this! Hope it's at least not a complete waste of your time.

 ~*~ ~*~ ~*~

_Hello_  
 _Tell me you know_  
 _You figured me out  
_ _Something gave it away_

Dean didn't even notice he'd slammed the book on the table, covers spread so that it stood upright, open, in front of him when he landed his head on his arms and as he did so, collided with the pages just enough to make the book tilt and slowly - very slowly - fall back.  
He only woke up to the fact as Sam reached over the table with a quiet "whoa, whoa" echoing in the study room. The tap of his fingers spread out to catch the falling book was a soft and small sound that told Dean he'd unintendingly let a secret out.  
He felt the younger's eyes upon him and imagined the look in them to be judgemental. After all, he was mistreating Sam's most precious possessions here, an ancient Letters book, an invaluable well of information - and he didn't give a single crap. He couldn't find it in him to even attempt to begin with. So when he raised his eyes and saw worry instead of the usual pissed off expression suited for these occasions, he was momentarily at loss for words.  
Sam laid down the book, gently like it was made of porcelain, but didn't pull back over the table. Instead he leaned over and kept staring.  
"Dean, will you finally talk to me?"

Dean grimaced.  
"About what?" he huffed, attempting a joking voice, "Will you make me coffee if I say I'm tired?"

Now the pissy face was there. Something achieved, if nothing productive still. Sam hesitated for just a moment before landing heavily back in his chair on the opposite side of the table. He looked disappointed, but such was life.  
Dean lowered his gaze and swallowed thickly, reaching out his hand to pick up and open the book again from where he'd left off. He couldn't, for the sake of everything, remember a single line he'd read, so he never found that spot. Instead, he began moving his eyes over the lines as if he was reading, while in reality, his thoughts were back on the old tracks again.

 _It would be such a beautiful moment,_  
 _to see the look on your face  
_ _To know that I know that you know now._

His fingers slipped between the pages and turned one too many. He didn't notice - Sam did. The silence stretched on with neither of them reading.

 _And baby, that's a case of my wishful thinking  
_ _You know nothing._

The course of Dean's thoughts went on like a steady river, spanning a couple miles in full length from point A to back again, because it was a perfect circle. Sometimes smaller streams headed out of the main current, but time after time they, too, imitated the parent flow and rejoined its course. The body of water was in essence all he had been with Castiel, the motion in the flow were the things they'd said, the colours in the currents the things they hadn't, and the riverbed was the aching longing and all the needs that couldn't be named - and even if they'd had names to be called by, shouldn't have been noted at all.

His throat was the ground that the river soaked, and although he'd kept breathing for a while now despite it, he was eventually drowning and falling apart, becoming just another victim of the river that ran within his own body. He should have been able to control it. He was so much more than just the river - he held it together with his own thoughts. So why was it taking over him? Why couldn't he just put an end to it?

He reached out to turn the page, and that was the undoing of his covers once more, as his eyes were trapped onto the fine ink lines forming the shape of a medieval demon, pulling a naked ink woman up by the hair with its long tongue sticking out of a grimace. It looked like an old man, and behind the grimace was a hollow pain.

Another thick swallow.

"Dean?" Sam called again.  
His voice shook Dean back into reality, although his spirit remained locked in a given crypt, his ears echoing the sounds of words he'd said and none of those that he'd received, twisting and turning, forcing him to wonder whether he could have done more, said more, if there'd been anything to stop the -

"You really look like you could use some rest."

Dean laughed. The younger would see through it - he didn't know why he bothered. It seemed instinctive, unavoidable, something like a programmed response.  
"Nah, I'm fine, Sammy. Stop projecting. You've had a hard ride recently too - damn, worse than mine no doubt. So, how about _you_ get some rest and leave me with the research? I'll wake you up if I find anything, or if Kevin calls, or something else comes up. C'mon."

Sam's disbelieving, crooked, all-around unimpressed grin was one more expression on the list of those Dean expected and did not necessarily currently need to see. He stared back at the other, his poker face intact.  
The younger huffed, shook his head, looked down at his book and then closed it. He stood up and looked at Dean again.  
"You're unbelievable," he said, and his voice laid the judgement on the table.  
Dean winked at him. He was too tired to fight in words.  
Sam stared.  
"Okay," the taller spoke after a while, "I'll get some sleep. But if I wake up and find that you're still awake, I'm going to make sure that's the end of it."

Dean licked at his dry lower lip and turned to fake-read the book again, finally managing past the picture of the demon.  
"Sure you will. I'll work so much better with a concussion."

"At least you'll sleep."

"If you can call coma sleeping, then yeah, sure, I guess I will. Nights, Sam."

"Good night, Dean."

Dean watched him go from under his brows, and when Sam had closed the door to the living quarters behind him, he pushed the book in the middle of the table and rose right up instead. He did want that coffee, and since Sam hadn't warmed up to his games, he'd have to get it himself. One thing he had no intentions of doing anytime soon was sleeping. His eyes scanned the walls and the well-hidden protective sigils and was oddly comforted by the restlessness that lacking angel proofing provided him with.  
He measured coffee into the filter ( _"Hey, Cas? You're still MIA."_ ), pushed the basket back in place ( _"So I hope you're okay -"_ ), poured water into the reservoir ( _"- and that your mission's going okay, too, because it'd be really cool to -"_ ) and turned the power on ( _"- have you home soon, man."_ ).  
As the gurgling sounds started, he turned around and leaned his back against the counter, raising his face up to the ceiling. The faint, nearly fluorescent lines of the devil's trap there made his stomach jump in excitement at nothing in particular. It was a stupid place for a devil's trap. In a base covered from floor to walls and the ceiling with nothing but demon proofing, it served no functional purpose at all. But, then again, maybe it had not been that way forever. Perhaps it _had_ once served a purpose.

"If you have the chance, the offer still stands, you know? Drop by when you can."  
Bring home all the guilt, all the unspoken words, and put an end to my doubts. Dean lowered his gaze again. There were orange stains on the floor from the soup they'd had earlier with Sam. He could still taste it in his mouth, or at least he remembered it very vividly. As much as he loved their new home, all of its luxuries were running dry for him now. He lacked a fundamental building piece for comfort. His family, the remaining torn bits of it, was falling apart to nothing. He feared that soon there would be no pieces to pick up anymore, and for once, it seemed like he would be the one who would have to go on living after everyone else was gone.

*

 _Well, you and I  
_ _Why, we go carrying on for hours on end_

When had it all started? It wasn't so simple. It wasn't like in the movies when you could just pinpoint the exact moment when _it_ happened, whatever the _it_ stood for in the given context. For Dean and Castiel, or at least for Dean, _it_ could have happened on multiple occasions, and -  
\- he tried his hardest not to dwell on the beginning of that sentence, the question of whether to use plurals or singulars. It interfered with his feverish thinking, yet if there was one victory he was not handing out to any of his enemies, it was the seed of doubt with this one. Naomi would not have it so easily. So, for the sake of the argument, this would be _for them_ and not _for him_.

He recollected his thoughts; perhaps there was a moment that could be considered to be that magical movie moment. Perhaps it had been the second Castiel had walked in through that flimsy barn door, or at the latest when Dean had stabbed him in the chest. Perhaps it went further back than that, to the moment Dean had no recollection of, the only moment he'd spent in hell that he wasn't fully aware of and also the only one he would have liked to remember at times, to know how it had happened. Alas, he did not. Instead, he did remember crawling out of a six feet deep grave and gasping for air and getting a throatful of earth stuck in his pipes instead, but that was besides the point he was trying to make to himself now.

Most likely, _it_ had been a sliding thing that had crawled up on them when they hadn't been looking. They'd been busy enough not to notice, and ironically, all that time they'd spent fighting for their lives and for those of everyone else had been the very thing that had helped _it_ to take over them.  
(Or him. There it was again - the Doubt. Dean brushed it away with a physical rub through his short hair and let out a long sigh into the dark. His heart raced. It was the coffee and the lack of rest, doing away with even a chance for the latter to happen.)

Through the momentary silence of his mind, new thoughts emerged. The recycled, highlighted memories of all the times he'd let go, the times he'd _failed_ , came through clearly in the pitch black of the room, like mute films cast on the walls by a fully functioning projector. The colours of his memories were obnoxiously bright, the blood and the water and the black and the green all shone through so blindingly that they could have been pieces falling out of the sun that lurked in the background for most. Funny, that - they'd often said goodbyes in broad daylight, yet in Dean's mind, every last one of those moments was visually dark. The contrast of each scenery was set up so high that the light couldn't smooth out the painful details.

Those memories were the ones he tried to avoid the most, yet they always returned, through thick and thin they were like his most faithful companions - over and over again, through them he witnessed the deaths of his loved ones, the betrayals, the failures. All of it in one long tragedy, seemingly dipped in self-pity but baked out of the blood of the wounds that cut right into his bones and beyond. His shortcomings always cost lives. He was poison, he corrupted, he broke. And that was the gist of it. That was what he was. He was a sword with no handle but a double blade instead, smeared in venom, enchanted to force itself onto those who would not let go once they'd caught a hold, and that was their undoing. He was a curse living amongst the cursed ones. And he loved them all with a fierce, desperate obsessiveness that burned away the rational doubt, prevented him from just turning and leaving like he should have. So he went on destroying everything he held dear.

He'd tested Castiel for the best part of the time they'd known each other. When Dean had thought he was settled on the angel's strength, he had started showing weakness. It was only through that weakness that Dean would truly come to know him - the pain Castiel had caused him had been the seal to what they were, because only when the most logical thing for Dean to do had been giving him up, he realised there was nothing he was less prepared to do. His disappointment, the feelings of having been deceived, fueled his will to put up a fight for what he hoped rather than knew was worth fighting for. In the end, they had come through, but only to fall apart again. In the particular case his mind was stuck on now, that hadn't taken so long. What had it been - two, three minutes he'd been reunited with the angel he'd reached out to?  
And then, afterwards, there wasn't that much to hold on to. It was only reunion for the sake of reseparation. Those brief moments were etched in Dean's mind like years, each second taking space in his memory reserved for hours. In between there were the glances they exchanged, all the wordless communication Dean had never really known how to translate in his mind but that had convinced his heart of more things than words had ever managed to. It was like having the chance to touchanother's soul, knowing inside the truths that couldn't be spoken in words. He only remembered the blue in all of those moments.

 _How long can I go on like this,_  
 _wishing to kiss you,  
_ _before I rightly explode?_

Purgatory had been... they'd called it "pure". That had been for a reason, or perhaps more accurately, it had been for multiple reasons. Dean missed that, the feeling of acuteness, presence, the violent existence from this second to the first fraction of the next only, where the future stretched onto nothing but your next move, the fling of your weapon and the killing blow that would allow you to continue existing. The only plans they'd laid there were how to get from group to another, hacking their way through monsters like jungle plants blocking their way.

Thinking of it now was painful, but that had slowly become the usual state of things for Dean. Thinking of _anything_ hurt. It was more of a question of what hurt more, which thoughts to avoid, and while this was one of the ones he'd rather not think, it allowed him to move on with the course his mind had chosen as the tools of torture tonight. A hint of a smile passed his lips, disappearing into the black solitude of his room. He adjusted on his mattress, allowing himself a moment of comfort right there. This room was like an egg: a small, safe place with strong walls that was still disconnected from the chaos that reigned outside. He was surrounded by the noises of silence, like waves in the ocean, rythmically guarded by his own beating heart.

Yes, Purgatory. Benny had been a godsend. Little doubt had ever shadowed the fact that without the vampire, Dean would still either be down there - or he would be dead. It was possible that Dean would have found Castiel without the vampire's help, and it was possible that he would have eventually stumbled upon the portal, too, despite practically walking in the opposite direction most the time. It would have taken some hundred years, maybe more, but he was a veteran, dying wasn't the business he dealt in. Survival was. Whether he'd have those hundred years to spare had, of course, depended partially on Castiel and his sacrifice: if the angel would have died, the Leviathans would have gone for Dean next. That had been the very reason Castiel had used to get away from him in the first place. And indeed, every other monster in there had certainly loved tracking Dean out of all things, and if there had ever been a race to hold a grudge against him outside of Hell, the Leviathans were certainly it.  
Alone, he wouldn't have stood a chance.  
With Castiel, he would have stood just that, for a little while at least. Castiel... Castiel had always fought the fiercest with him in danger. Together, Dean would have always been in what Castiel considered danger, so there was that. Problem was that Castiel would have run like hell away from him the closer he got if Benny hadn't known of the portal. When he knew that he could guide Dean to safety, get him out of the fire and back to the frying pan, he had played along. For Dean alone, however, the safest place would have without doubt in the angel's mind been as far from him as possible.

There were many, many things about Purgatory that kept resurfacing every day in Dean's mind - a part of him - a wild, calloused part of him - had loved it. He understood why Benny had stayed, he could see the vampire's point of view just fine. He could see why Castiel had...

The air in the room seemed to be closing in and Dean gasped for air, trembling, trying to hold himself together. His hands clutched the blanket underneath and he tried to swallow, tried to breath. He trembled more. These moments were like hacking coughs - they cut him off from his thoughts, he suffered through them, and then he returned to normal, or as normal as he could feel covered in cold sweat and with a piercing pain surrounding the mess that resided inside his chest. The feeling resembled that of waking up from a realistic nightmare. The only difference was that Dean's nightmares had wandered free from the limited realm of sleep and entered even his waking hours, especially during the time he spent in dark pretending to be trying to fall asleep.  
He swallowed, reminded himself of how to breathe. He opened his eyes and recalled where he was.

Finally, he could resume dwelling in his memories again. A wavering excuse of a smile pulled up only the other corner of his mouth.  
Yes - he could see why Castiel had stayed. The reason lied in the need for judgement, sentence and purification, and that was everything Purgatory stood for. Right now, Dean could have used that. He didn't want time to think, he wanted something to stop him from thinking altogether. While he had been stuck there, he'd always had a purpose. Now he was the one without purpose, the one standing still and watching everything fall apart. He wasn't sure when that had started. Back when he'd resurfaced and found out that Sam had been up to nothing if not forgetting him, or when Castiel's ghost had started haunting him, or a little while later when he'd realised he had never gotten Castiel back in the first place and despite that he was still losing the angel all over again. Perhaps only when he'd figured out that Sam was bleeding from the inside and keeping it secret from him. Yet somewhere along the way he'd realised that he was the bystander, and he could do nothing about anything. He just watched and prayed in vain to the silence of the night like the rest of the world, because for once, he always knew there was nobody to answer him. Cas wouldn't come. Maybe Cas heard him, maybe he did not, a lot of things pointed towards to him hearing well enough and just deciding not to act, but Dean didn't want to think of that. Now, of course, there was that whole _purpose_ backing him up - Castiel would not come to him, he had this tablet to protect. And Nao-

No.  
Not that again.

Dean turned on his side, assumed fetal position and bit the blanket so hard his teeth ached. For no reason, he grinded at the fabric and kicked the mattress, then turned on his back again and ran his nails deep into the blanket, ripping. He could feel his nails bending, turning, breaking, but the mild discomfort that provided was a relief.  
It anchored him there, away from the lying, manipulative bitch who had sown one hell of a seed right in the middle of his broken will.  
The discomfort brought him far from her, further still.  
His nail got stuck on a thread that bit underneath it and tore the flesh open like a paper cut.  
He could breathe again. In relief, he closed his eyes.

It wasn't like he thought he was more important to the angel than the protection of, well, the thrice damned angel tablet capable of cutting off Heaven for forever. The problem was that he _wished_ he was.

 _This double life I lead isn't healthy for me_  
 _In fact, it makes me nervous  
_ _If I get caught I could be risking it all._

_Because maybe there's a lot that I miss_  
 _in case I'm wrong._

There was something soothing about knowing you were going to die, Dean had learned that. When you were faced with the inevitable, what remained was to make the best of the time you had left. Being denied this luxury, he was left with trying to come up with new coping methods to keep the monsters under his bed. Those were the ones he'd put there himself and made sure they stayed there, hidden, because he was too afraid to face them. Indeed, one of the monsters was and had always been fear itself. It was the one that kept trying to sneak out despite all the defenses he'd built. But fear, while incapacitating, paralyzing and fatal, was not the worst. In itself, fear was a natural thing. The beasts that it dragged along were what made Dean so vulnerable to it, and the worst of them all was loneliness.

More than anything, he feared being the one left behind. Reason and logic had nothing to do with that. He held onto everything and everyone in his life with all he had, but he'd learned that it was for nothing - no matter how hard he'd hold, all he loved would slip through his fingers.  
In essence, this was what it always came down to.  
With Castiel, there was more to it.

Dean had never been in love. He'd never allowed that to happen, and it wasn't like he had been struggling, either. There hadn't been many who had gotten close. He wasn't a stranger to love - he loved Sam so much he had literally been to hell for it, and he'd loved his mother and his father, and he'd loved Bobby. He'd loved Ellen and Jo, Ben and Benny. The list went on, all names but Sam's and Ben's those that had been carved to both figurative and literal gravestones and laid to rest. And, yes, Sam's name had been on those quite a couple times now. The irony of it was crushing. It seemed to be the ones he loved the most that he would have to lose again and again.

But then, then there was Lisa. Lisa had come close. She had edged on being the one love he'd have, but she had never crossed there - she had become family, and Dean had loved her, but he had never fallen in love with her. In the end, Dean simply couldn't afford it. He couldn't afford letting someone so vulnerable too close to him, he couldn't let her mean everything to him when all his love did was hurt, and she was mortally unprepared for that. He'd become a guardian instead, and in the end his obsession with her safety had killed what had been between them.  
The difference was that she hadn't fought it. She'd let him go. She had pushed him away when it had come clear they wouldn't work out. She had done what a rational person would, distanced herself and looked for happiness elsewhere.

The difference to what?  
The bitter, small smile was back on Dean's face.  
Difference to Castiel.

Yes, that was what his tests had been about. He had acted like a child around Castiel, throwing tantrums, running away, spitting in his face, calling him names, figuring out his weak spots and then constantly poking at them until he'd found (albeit accidentally) the one that hurt enough to drive him over the edge. But Castiel had not left. That was the thing that stood out, year after year, tragedy after tragedy. Castiel did _not_ leave.  
It had, perhaps for the first time, come clear to him when he'd found that weak spot. When he had found himself bloodied on the ground, ready to die by the hand of the angel, on a filthy alley smelling of urine and old cigarettes, and found out that even now when he was worth nothing to the older, he still held value, and Castiel did not leave. Neither did he kill him. He brought him back to safety, even when all about him had screamed the will to beat him until there was nothing left to hit anymore, because in his eyes Dean had betrayed him and that betrayal had cost _everything_ to him. That whole scenery bore striking resemblance to their more recent history - yet it was a whole another chapter, one that Dean didn't know the ending of yet, nor did he know if they would come out of it stronger than before like the last time. It seemed highly unlikely. It seemed... entirely hopeless. The only light at the end of the tunnel was that so it had seemed back then, too. Perhaps there was a way out - a way for them both.

_Well, all I really wanna do is love you_  
 _A kind much closer than friends use_  
 _But I still can't say it_  
 _After all we've been through._

He'd missed that chance. He'd said "I need you". And he'd meant it, he truly had. He'd meant that and everything between, under, above and on both sides of the line. But had he said "I love you" instead, he wouldn't regret it now, not hour after hour after hour - the regret wouldn't be there to suffocate him while he tried his hardest to banish all thoughts from his mind. It wouldn't always come back to that. It wouldn't echo in his mind, the visions wouldn't be there, or if they would, there would at least have to be closure of some sort instead of an open question that bled like an artery.

 _Need_ described it all better. It was all he could wish to communicate to Castiel, but human words are fragile and deceiving. They can be twisted, a listener might not understand it as the speaker means it. Led Zeppelin had put it well; _Sometimes words have to meanings._ This word, in all its weight and seriousness, held at least fifteen of them. Each was important.  
So how had Castiel, who was by no means native to sublime meanings in human language, interpreted it? He hadn't told Dean. He hadn't told Dean much of anything - he had packed up and disappeared and held a strict line of radio silence ever since. Dean didn't blame him, or rather, he wouldn't have blamed him even if such a thing had even been possible for him anymore. It had been full-out chaos with little time for communication between them. Castiel had been as confused as Dean, and it was entirely possible he hadn't understood that Dean was dying for the answers he hadn't gotten. What Dean was nearly certain about was that he hadn't caught up on the one unspoken question that was now killing Dean inside no matter how hard he lied to himself.

Yet, if he'd been in that situation again - if he could even change just that one line - Dean knew one thing for certain. He wouldn't. Not because what its value was, although that was one of the core reasons, but because he couldn't say the words he needed. They got stuck in his throat and made him choke every time he tried them with the tip of his tongue. They froze his lips when he mouthed them. They grabbed a hold of his heart and crushed it when he thought of them.

I love you.  
 _I love you.  
_ I love you.

No matter how much he tried, the syllables never fell together right.  
It was the name that changed the essence of them, made them so heavy that he couldn't voice them - made them so dangerous he didn't dare to whisper them.

 _If I should be so bold_  
 _I_ _'d ask you to hold my heart in your hand_  
 _I'd tell you from the start how I've longed to be your man  
_ _But I never said a word_

_I guess I'm gonna miss my chance again._

Could he afford to lose another chance? Through all his doubts, he knew that he would meet Castiel again. This wasn't the end, not yet, and he would have his shot in the dark. He tried to imagine it: being face to face with the angel who had died for him, fallen for him, betrayed him, bled for him, suffered for him, stayed behind for him, broken free for him.  
The memory of him, just him, was vivid like the memories of what they'd been through together; it was an image as alive as a person standing right in front of Dean, breathing, shining with that strange saturation of colours and lights. The oddest part was that when Dean imagined him, he was smiling. He couldn't remember many times he'd seen Castiel smile at all, yet when he conjured his image up in his mind, the curve of his lips and the warmth in his eyes was as clear and real as the image of the trench coat he wore, like Dean had seen it every day ever since they'd met.

If he'd truly stood there in front of him now and they'd had all the time in the world, yet this would be the last chance they'd ever get, would Dean be strong enough to tell him? The man smiled a broken smile, his eyes closed, vision behind the lids filled with what he imagined. The answer came quite clear to him. Yet even stronger than the resignment before what seemed like the only fate he could not fight was the knowledge of one thing: no matter what would come, no matter how painful it would be, no matter how unlikely it would seem, Dean would never give up on getting that one more chance to try again. That was the way it worked. The chance they had was always, and would always be, the last they had. And after it would come another, because neither of them would ever stop fighting. It was crystal clear now, and as Dean pulled the blanket over himself, body heavy with the need to sleep, he realised that Naomi knew it too. That was the only solid truth he could hang onto: that no matter what, he was the one thing Castiel always returned to - the one thing that met him in the middle, struggling as much as the angel struggled to be there with him. Always.

 _All I really want from you is to feel me  
_ _as the feeling inside keeps building_

 _I'll find a way to you if it kills me.  
_ _It might kill me._


End file.
